A Serious Man (2009)

Early in the film physics professor Larry Gopnik (the unknown Micheal Stuhlbarg in a career making performance) explains to one of his less gifted students that the illustrative stories he tells in class are not really ‘physics’, just parables designed to illuminate principles that even he doesn’t always fully comprehend. That brief moment helps explain a lot about A Serious Man, the Coen brothers most recent film, and their most satisfying and philosophical ‘comedy’ since The Man Who Wasn’t There.

Set among Jews in suburban 1967 Minnesota, the Coen’s for really the first time (with the arguable exception of Fargo) mine their formative environment for story setting. It’s a marvelous recreation, free from the overbearing, forced sense of history present in many films set in the past, the film is not so much nostalgic as it is an incredibly detailed rendering of a time and place, largely free from sentimentality or value judgments of any kind. The story line bares obvious and intentional similarity to the Book of Job, as ’everyman’ Gopnik is subjected to an unremitting stream of every possible hard ship: At home his wife wants to leave him for his best friend, his son’s smoking pot, his daughter emotionally distant, his brother who is living with them suffers from an unremitting neck cyst and appears to be involved in some illegal activity. On top of that one of his students is trying to extort him, he gets into an auto accident, and on the eve of his review for tenure his department keeps receiving unsigned disparaging letters about him.

Gopnik tries to take solace in family, friends, religion, and legal and medical professionals, but all are found wanting. The possibility exists of starting an affair with the sultry neighbor whose husband is always away on business, but being a moral man Larry will not try, and even his dreams give him little respit. In fact its his innocence that most troubles Larry about his situation, he could understand it if he were a bad man and deserved to be punished, but as he keeps protesting throughout the film, “I didn’t do anything!” This I think is what the film is about, the unfair ordeal, the constant stream of seeming punishments that is life, and in so being is consistent with the Coen’s generally dark world view. Smart, subtle, satirical, stylized, and near Talmudicly layered and dense, this is one of the best and most literate of the brothers work, surpisingly funny, and one of the best films of the year. Thumbs Up.